Today, in the middle of being overloaded with estrogen…I’m thankful for pictures.

I’m obsessed with taking pictures.  It’s a family trait; it’s not really my fault.  I take TONS of pictures.  I have to be honest and say I don’t really feel like any experience in our lives really happened if I don’t have a picture to go with it.  My pictures are VERY important to me.  Sometimes I feel a little crazy with how overboard I can go, or sometimes I worry a little about how crazy everyone else might be thinking I am. 

But in the end, I’m always thankful that I have my pictures.

And today I’m especially thankful for sweet little girl pictures.  They help me hold onto a piece of my babies when they go and decide to grow up!

It was the tiniest thing I ever decided to put my whole life into.
~Terri Guillemets

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about TV, and the place of prominence it can sometimes have in our daily life.

People with thoughts about TV tend to be REALLY EXTREME, and that’s not where this is going, so don’t worry.

We tried out the Unplugged Project this week and it was a lot of fun.  It got me thinking a little about our TV habits.

And then, we watched the Berenstein Bears.  It’s a really cute show, I know.  It was one of those rare times when I actually ended up watching the whole show with the girls, really only because I was busy styling their hair for church, and it kept them still.

But this episode was really…interesting.  Mama Bear is completely frustrated because Brother, Sister, and Papa are always watching so much TV.  So she makes a rule of no TV for a week.  At first they’re horribly bored and miserable, but then they find all of these fun and exciting things to do because they are not just sitting around watching TV.  The moral of the show is of course that watching too much TV makes you miss out on a lot of fun stuff.  Great.

I just thought it was a little ironic that my kids were recieving this message via a TV show.

Do they seriously want us to stop watching their show?  I doubt it.

Anyway, this is what really got me thinking about my thoughts on televison and the role it plays in our lives as a family, and especially in the lives of my kids.

Some people have the tendency to decide TV is the devil and turn into television nazis.  This is not me.

It’s easy for me not to see it as completely evil because we don’t have cable.  My kids get to see shows on PBS thanks to our awesome rabbit ears, which i know will not be working very soon:( but for now they’re great.  The rest of the time they are watching videos that we own or have borrowed from the library.

I know not all TV programming is perfect, but I can’t deny that it does have some benefit.

Miss A learned all of her colors, shapes, and numbers basically through Baby Einstein, which I am embarassed to admit, but it’s totally true.  She also picked up a HUGE vocabulary from these videos once she started talking.

The new obsession in our house has been Superwhy.

It’s actually kind of cute, and has got them totally hooked on having their capes and wands at all times, AND, Miss E now knows the ENTIRE alphabet. 

She’s 3 by the way.  All of the sudden she is looking at things around the house and pointing at each letter as she spells the words to me.

So, for those of you who may be out to convince me that the telvision will rot my kids brains, don’t bother, because I just won’t believe it.  If they were watching inappropriate things all the time that argument would of course be different.  But they’re not so…

This is my thought on TV: it’s like juice.

Thanks to WIC, we have a never ending abundance of 100% fruit juice in our house at all times.  Juice is good for you, so that’s nice.  And the girls love it.  But if you’ve ever read anything about childhood nutrition, you know there is a problem with juice.  It’s very filling.  And if the kids are filling up with juice all day, then they don’t eat as much food.  So even though the juice may be “healthy”, they are missing out on a lot of nutrition that is in food and can’t be found in juice. 

Now, I don’t think anyone has ever died from drinking too much juice.  Because it’s not really BAD for you.  It’s just that you could be having something that’s BETTER for you instead of all that juice.

I’m sure you get my point.  I have no intention of banning television or juice in my house, I just need to help my girls have these things in MODERATION.

TV is fun.  Especially Superwhy.  And I can’t deny that I don’t want to take it away from my girls because they love it SO MUCH!  But they also love painting, and dress up, and digging in the dirt.  I just have to make sure they get a good balance of all the things they love.

So we can watch Superwhy and have a cup of juice with dinner, and fill the rest of the day with water and creative play!;) 

Our church has a men’s softball team.  Of course Hombre has been playing.  Mysteriously they’ve been in first place all season.  Last night they had the play-offs.

Their first game was SO CLOSE, I was glad I had the distraction of supervising my children because I would’ve been way too stressed out. 

The last game was a little more relaxed.  And they won… Woohoo!

The girls were quite proud and COMPLETELY filthy by the end of it.  But it was a lot of fun. 

A huge crowd of people from church came out to watch.  All the kids played in the dirt and chased frogs (they were everywhere…kids AND frogs).  In the midst of all of the chaos it was kind of relaxing.  It kind of felt like one of those Andy Griffith moments…:)

Maybe that small town feeling I love isn’t really the town…maybe it’s the people…the community.  And maybe I already have a “Mayberry” in my life.

I’ve been reading this blog for awhile, basically about getting the kids away from all of the electronics and instead doing something creative.  Definitely my kind of thing….but it’s just so easy to turn on the tv when there is SO much to get done and three crazy kids in the way.

So I’m trying to change that, and include the girls in more of my busy-ness, instead of just pushing them out of the way.  And also trying to push some of the busy-ness out of the way and spend more time having fun. 

On that note I’ve decided we’re going to try doing the weekly Unplugged Project.  It sounds like fun and honestly, having a bit of a “deadline” is usually a good thing for me.

This week the theme was “flat”.  I was a little unsure what to do; I tend to do better with real specific instructions, so apparently this is going to stretch my creativity too.  Anyway we were at the library and I saw this book.  I never check out kids craft books at the library, mostly because I already own a ton that we hardly even use.  But I got really excited about this one because it said all of the activities were based around construction paper only, which is really great since I purchased mine at Costco.

The girls and I selected two activities, both of which are flat:) 

The first one was just making a square and triangle picture. The book showed things like a house, or a rainbow, but we kind of ended up with more of just a collage.  That’s okay.  The glue sticks were really exciting!

The second project was making a mirror image.  This one was a little more complicated and created some serious stress for a bit.  I should mention the book says it’s for ages 4-10, so there are multiple levels of projects.  This one would probably be fun and easy for a ten year old, but for a 3 and 6 year old it required quite a bit of assistance.

It did turn out really cool though and the girls were so proud once we finished.

We wrapped up using one of our fabulous art books, with a picture by and discussion of M.C. Escher.  Super educational!!!;)

To see more flat creations click here.  (you might need to scroll down a bit.)